ZAGREB, January 20, 2018 – The Croatian Democratic Union’s (HDZ) former leader, Tomislav Karamarko, has written on his Facebook account that that the decision of High Administrative Court to uphold the Zagreb-based Administrative Court’s judgment about him being in conflict of interest fills him with indignation.
Karamarko insists that there has been no conflict of interest in his case and that he only wanted to warn about huge damage that might be caused for Croatia if it loses an arbitration process against Hungary’s MOL in the INA-MOL case.
Media outlets have recently reported that the High Administrative Court has ruled that during his term as Deputy Prime Minister, Karamarko found himself in conflict of interest when he advocated Croatia’s withdrawal from the arbitration, while withholding the information that his wife Ana’s company Drima did business with MOL lobbyist Jozo Petrović.
In mid-May 2016, the Conflict of Interest Commission found that Deputy Prime Minister and HDZ leader Karamarko was in conflict of interest when he had been expressing his personal views and suggestions that Croatia should abandon the arbitration proceedings with MOL over the Croatia’s oil and gas company INA, and that this was evident when Karamarko expressed his opinions at the council for cooperation of the HDZ and MOST parties earlier that May, when that coalition was in power.
The decision by the Conflict of Interest Commission actually paved the way for the procedure in which MOST insisted on the impeachment of Karamarko, and all those developments resulted in the collapse of that government and on Karamarko’s withdrawal from the HDZ helm.
In September 2016, the Zagreb Administrative Court upheld a decision by the Conflict of Interest Commission that Karamarko had been in conflict of interest due to his business and private relations with MOL adviser Petrović.
